April 1, 2008
Library looks at digital future
From left: Bruce Heterick, JSTOR; Bill Mayer, University Librarian; Ken DiFiore, Portico; Michael Spinella, JSTOR executive director; Kimberly Lutz, JSTOR; and Jason Phillips, Kogod ’99, JSTOR (Photo by Jeff Watts)
The purpose of university libraries used to be clear. They were a place to find books and journals.
Libraries bought books and journals, archived them, and made them available to scholars who, without going to the library, couldn’t do their research.
Scholars still need books and journals. But now that they’re online through a myriad of databases, how does that change the purpose of libraries? What will their role be in the digital future?
That was the context of a forum last week hosted by AU Library and JSTOR, the scholarly journal archive widely used by academics. Through JSTOR, scholars can pull up specialized journals online and conduct research that they once could have done only if their university libraries subscribed to the journal.
It’s not that print is becoming obsolete. Faculty are far from indifferent to print, and it’s widely agreed that some libraries must always maintain a hard copy collection of journals, said JSTOR executive director Michael Spinella. But how many libraries need hard copies? And how important is print to research?
The answer varies depending on the field. Art historians are the scholars who find it most crucial for libraries to keep hard copies of journals; over 80 percent find that key, according to surveys. Historians in general place a high value on hard copies, as do social scientists.
But increasingly, faculty in all disciplines are leaning more toward electronic resources. For libraries, that means technical skills and the ability to offer electronic resources are increasingly central to their mission.
JSTOR is a subscription-based archive of digitized scholarly journals that is offered by many university libraries, including AU. At present, material is provided by more than 400 publishers, with more than 700 titles, mainly in the arts and sciences. Digitization is an ongoing project.
But isn’t there a danger embedded in relying too heavily on electronic access? Couldn’t the print legacy be lost?
The speakers from JSTOR described the way that print copies are being archived, with repositories of 25 million pages at Harvard, University of California, and soon, an international repository through the British Library. Electronic backups of the full archives are also stored at Princeton University and in facilities in Colorado and Britain.
Among the concerns, though, are that electronic files could become inaccessible as technology becomes obsolete. For instance, there was much publicity when data sent from the Apollo 11 moon flight to NASA turned up lost. But Ken diFiore of Portico noted that the historic data, which he suspects has been mislaid rather than deleted, can’t be accessed even if it is found because the machines that could play the data are no longer around.
So part of what electronic archives must do is recognize that technology will become obsolete and maintain ways to access data when that happens.
The forum examined emerging best practices in online information access and the way that print resources are migrating to a digital format in higher education. “The library is bringing the conversation about digitizing, and the digital future of scholarship, to campus and engaging the wider campus community in these questions. The library is sort of the fulcrum for handling those questions,” said Jennifer McMillan, assistant director of development for the library.
University Librarian Bill Mayer opened the program, which featured Spinella; Ken DiFiore, associate director of library relations for Portico; JSTOR director of publisher relations Kimberly Lutz; and JSTOR director of library relations Bruce Heterick. The forum will be an annual event.
